While there is no native Linux version of EditPad Pro 8, it is perfectly possible to run the Windows version of EditPad Pro 8 on Linux using Wine. Wine is an application designed to run Windows applications on Linux. Aside from a few very minor glitches, this works just fine. Wine is free software and does not require you to have a license to Microsoft Windows.
First, Wine needs to be installed on your Linux computer. Most Linux distributions include Wine as an optional package that can be installed via the system’s package manager or app store. If your Linux distribution does not include Wine, go to winehq.org to download it.
Once Wine is installed, use the web browser on your Linux computer to download EditPad Pro. If your browser asks you whether you want to open or run the file with Wine or save the file, select to save the file. Open a terminal screen, cd to your download directory, and enter: wine SetupEditPadPro8Demo.exe (change .exe file name to what you actually downloaded). EditPad Pro’s installer will pop up. Click the Immediate Installation button for a quick install.
To start EditPad Pro, double-click the EditPad Pro icon that the installer placed on your desktop. If there’s no desktop shortcut, type wine "c:\Program Files\Just Great Software\EditPad Pro 8\EditPadPro8.exe" in a terminal screen (assuming you used the default installation folder).
The File|Open dialog in EditPad Pro defaults to a “My Documents” folder that mimics Windows. If you click the Up button in the File|Open dialog a bunch of times you’ll eventually get to the root directory of your Linux system. EditPad Pro can access all your Linux files when running under Wine (subject to the Linux file permissions).
EditPad Pro is an extremely configurable text editor. The default settings are optimized to let Windows users get started immediately without configuring anything. This means that Linux users have a bit of work.
Select Options|Configure File Types in the menu. You’ll need to change the default encoding for most, if not all, file types. Click on the Encoding tab. Select the file types you want to change in the list at the left. You can select as many as you like using Shift+click and/or Ctrl+click. Set the default line break style to Linux (LF only). If the default text encoding is a Windows code page, change it into an ISO-8859 code page or UTF-8. If you’re unsure, select UTF-8. Most modern Linux distributions use UTF-8 for all text files. Turn off the option to write the byte order marker, but turn on the option to preserve its presence. Byte order markers are far less common on Linux than on Windows, and some applications cannot handle them.
Though Wine includes the most common Windows fonts, the fonts available on Linux aren’t the same as those available on Windows. In Options|Configure File Types|Editor Options, click the Edit button next to the drop-down list with text layouts. Delete the 4 predefined “complex script” layouts. Selects fonts that you like for the other 4 layouts. The text layout configuration screen is where you set default fonts. You can select a different default text layout for each file type.
I tested EditPad Pro 8 on an Ubuntu 18.4 installation that was clean other than having installed Wine via the Ubuntu Software Manager. After downloading with Firefox and choosing to run the download with Wine when prompted, the installer came up automatically and the Immediate Installation option went off without a hitch.
On Windows, EditPad Pro 8 uses Uniscribe to intelligently handle editing of text using right-to-left scripts like Hebrew and Arabic as well as complex scripts like the Indic scripts. Wine emulates Uniscribe but does not actually implement the intelligent handling of right-to-left and complex scripts that Uniscribe is used for. So you won’t get any errors when using a complex script text layout in EditPad Pro 8 running on Wine. But you won’t get the text editing experience you’d expect either.
EditPad Pro includes a help file in .chm format. Wine can display this help file only if Wine’s Gecko library is installed. Ubuntu 18.4 does not include this. The same text is available as an online user’s guide.
Older versions of Wine had more glitches. If EditPad Pro’s mouse pointer appears garbled, if the main menu sometimes stops responding to mouse clicks, or if integration with RegexBuddy or RegexMagic doesn’t work, upgrade to the latest version of Wine.